Category Spain

The European Commission, Council and Parliament are still negotiating the exact wording of an ancillary copyright for press publishers that will most likely be part of the upcoming EU Directive on copyright. If you have not yet heard about this new right or only a little and if you want to learn more about it, then Pamela Samuelson, who is the Richard M. Sherman Distinguished Professor of Law at Berkeley Law School, has just written the perfect article for you. Read more

The Spanish link tax is indeed no success story. All it "achieved" so far is the permanent shutdown of Google News Spain which led to a large drop in publishers' site views while not accumulating a single euro. Although this situation will change with the just closed deal, it first and foremost tries to shamelessly fool us into thinking that the link tax is actually working. Read more

Within the last couple of months, it has been very quiet about the Spanish link tax which aims to charge content aggregators a fee if they publish snippets of a news article. As a consequence, after this law was passed, Google News Spain, the main target of this measure, was shut down in 2014. But now the Spanish Reproduction Rights Centre (CEDRO) has initiated a new round of negotiations with several affected online services. The figures they ask for are shocking. Read more

EDiMA, the European trade association representing online platforms, has recently published a document that summarizes the research available on ancillary rights in news. The results are alarming. Read more

The Spanish Association of Daily Newspaper Publishers (AEDE) was the driving force behind the new copyright law that forces every news service to pay a royalty for showing snippets of articles. It will come into effect on 1st January 2015. Google reacted quickly and shut down Google News Spain on 16th December 2014. Now the same lobbyists want Google to come back and ask for help. Read more

As of today, associations of Polish, French, Spanish and Italian publishers dispatched an open letter to Günther Oettinger, European Commissioner for Digital Economy and Society. In the letter, the publishers express their “concerns with the recent developments in Spanish law, which directly target the sharing, linking and aggregation of content online with a new form of ‘ancillary right' triggering mandatory payments. IGEL, the Initiative against an ancillary copyright law for press publishers, supported that letter and acted as a signatory. Read more